Word: specter
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Hanging over the dispute, as well as almost every other discussion of U.S. intervention abroad for the past decade, is the chill specter of Viet Nam. Out of fear of repeating that colossal misadventure, Americans have seized hold of its lessons, perhaps inaccurately, perhaps obsessively. There is a strong aversion to undertaking any commitment to shore up threatened pro-American regimes in the Third World, no matter how strategically important they are, and a reluctance to believe that the countries of a region could topple like dominoes, no matter how compelling the evidence of spreading subversion. This is particularly true...
Throughout the West, reservoirs are full, rivers are bursting their banks, and the earth, loosened by constant downpours and melting snow, menaces highways and towns. In the mountainous parts of California, unusually heavy snowfalls, now beginning to melt, have raised the specter of unprecedented spring flooding. "The snow in the mountains is 200% above normal," observes Dean Coffey, manager of the San Francisco Hetch Hetchy Water and Power System. "I don't see how we can get away from flooding...
Somehow, spurred perhaps by the specter of himself as a loser, Mondale last summer finally got going again. He toughened up his speeches, put in longer days. When his staff handed him fund-raising lists, he sat down and made the grueling calls himself. He even agreed to a speech coach to help him appear more incandescent. He searched for an issue that matched his new forceful style and found one: a blunt call for the U.S. to get a lot tougher about Japanese trade. The high rhetoric had all the sounds of an illiberal protectionism, but Mondale plowed ahead...
...economic life easier. In addition to $1.4 million from the publisher, it has pulled in some $700,000 in foreign and subsidiary rights. Mailer's other books still earn royalties, and he commands up to $15,000 for a lecture. Yet he remains sensitive to the specter of debt. The Mailer household is economically...
...claim, as Reagan did, a monopoly on virtue and peaceful intentions. Sure enough, Izvestia, the Soviet government newspaper, launched a rhetorical counterstrike at Reagan, accusing him of turning "Washington into a dangerous hotbed of thermonuclear confrontation." Nor is there any way to exorcise from deterrence what Reagan called "the specter of retaliation." That specter is in the nature of nuclear weapons. As Winston Churchill observed nearly three decades ago: "Safety will be the sturdy child of terror, and survival the twin brother of annihilation...